The World’s Most Powerful Woman Won’t Call Herself a Feminist

Image

Success for Germany: A campaign poster for Angela Merkel, who appears likely to be re-elected as chancellor next Sunday.CreditCreditFabrizio Bensch/Reuters

By Susan Chira

Sept. 16, 2017

TORGAU, Germany — Angela Merkel has spent her political career playing down her gender: shunning a feminist label, offering modesty, caution and diligent preparation as an implicit contrast to male swagger. The chancellor seems to be coasting to re-election next Sunday as the most powerful woman in the world.

But to the crowds who waited out a downpour in a flower-bedecked town square here to hear her stump speech at a campaign rally, she is simply their leader, her gender immaterial.

Her success raises a question newly relevant after Hillary Clinton’s loss: Is this stealth strategy the most effective way for women to gain and wield power? Mrs. Clinton campaigned as a woman who would make history by shattering the highest glass ceiling; in response, a misogynistic backlash gripped segments of the United States.

By contrast, Ms. Merkel avoided dwelling on her historic first and cultivated a resolutely boring public persona, easing her ascent to lead a nation that long held conservative attitudes toward women. Men underestimated her, at their peril. Modest she may be, but also unhesitating in her pursuit and exercise of power. Her climb to the top and her 12-year tenure have proven her a masterful political practitioner, one who has seized opportunity, eliminated opponents and sustained popular support.

“She learned to cloak her purpose in a veil of blandness,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has observed Ms. Merkel as a journalist. Ms. Stelzenmüller, herself raised in West Germany, said Ms. Merkel’s experience surviving East Germany’s authoritarian rule gave her the skills to navigate the male political world she entered as the two Germanys reunited. Ms. Merkel, she said, learned that “you shut up, put up, and watch out for an opportunity, all the while trying not to get hurt.”

Ms. Merkel’s upbringing in East Germany, where most women worked and the state proclaimed gender equality even if patriarchy ruled at home, contributed to a resolution not to make a fetish of feminism. Eager to avoid being reduced to any one label, she expressed surprise that during her 2005 run for chancellor, journalists should ask her about being Germany’s first woman in that job. And at the Group of 20 meeting Ms. Merkel hosted this year, a moderator asked guests who included Ivanka Trump whether they saw themselves as feminists. Ms. Merkel didn’t raise her hand.

Yet she prevailed in Germany’s most stridently masculine party, said Bernd Ulrich, a columnist for Die Zeit who has known her for 20 years. She was a protégée of the long-serving chancellor Helmut Kohl, who referred to her as “mein mädchen,” my girl. Men in her own party derisively nicknamed her “Mutti,” or Mommy, meant as an insult but now adopted by the public as a token of trust. Ute Frevert, Germany’s leading gender historian, observed that Ms. Merkel has resisted all attempts to pigeonhole or condescend to her. (She also declines most interviews.)

“She’s the least motherly person you can imagine, though people want to build a feminine image of her that’s easier to digest,” Ms. Frevert said. Ms. Merkel and her husband, a chemist, do not have children. “But she doesn’t fall into that trap. She doesn’t smile and have a little girly instinct. She’s not a woman playing a man, either. She seems to be gender neutral in a way.”

It is an image she worked hard to foster. Ms. Merkel was mocked early in her career for frumpy dressing and frowsy hair; a car rental company ran an ad depicting her with windblown hair in a convertible, saying she had finally found the right hairstyle. So she adopted her current tidy bob and an unvarying uniform: a bright jacket (chartreuse at the Torgau rally) and sensible pants. She joked that in one of her first government jobs, as environment minister, she realized that people were staring at her shoes instead of listening to what she had to say. To prevent that, she made her wardrobe so predictable that a flurry of articles about the low-cut dress she wore to the opera in 2008 is one of the rare mentions of her clothing in the press.

“There was no etiquette for women in power,” said Sylke Tempel, editor in chief of The Berlin Policy Journal. “So she stopped the whole discussion of her looks.”

Nor did she challenge the men around her, until their own stumbles allowed her an opening. After 16 years in power, in 1999 Mr. Kohl and the Christian Democratic Union party were rocked by a campaign donation scandal. She placed an open letter in a newspaper calling on Mr. Kohl, her longtime mentor, to resign. A few months later, she was elected chairwoman of the party.

“She came to power by an act of breathtaking ruthlessness,” Ms. Stelzenmüller said. “If anything, it was Shakespearean in its aggression and calculation. Her route to power is lined with the political cadavers of a dozen and a half of these princes.”

Like many women who have advanced in politics, most recently Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, she took over at a time of crisis, when few men wanted the job. “She was selected by the boys because they were afraid to fail; they decided to choose her because she could fail,” said Angelika Huber-Strasser, a managing director at KPMG Germany. “And then they will sort it out, and one of the boys will take over.”

The boys had tended to be leaders like the physically imposing Mr. Kohl, or Gerhard Schröder, famous for his machismo and his four marriages. Now its first female chancellor runs Germany with a deliberately unshowy and sometimes maddeningly cautious style.

“There’s no need to shout or behave like an ape,” said Ellen Ueberschär, president of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, who has participated in several citizens’ groups Ms. Merkel convened to discuss women and power. “She’s not seducible by the symbols of power and that gives her power.”

It is a tactic that some women in Germany’s overwhelmingly male corporate world have come to emulate. Hiltrud D. Werner, the only woman on Volkswagen’s management board, said Ms. Merkel’s leadership was often invisible, because she painstakingly built consensus behind the scenes and avoided claiming credit for ideas she often originated.

“Very often we say, it’s enough for us women that things get done,” Ms. Werner said. “I don’t wait until the board meeting to confront my eight male colleagues with an idea. I speak to everyone up front in person to see what the obstacles and arguments are so I can incorporate them into my presentation. Very often this is more successful than the big bang.”

Ms. Merkel, like many women who have had to prove themselves, does her homework. When asked during the campaign how she handles “alpha males” like Vladimir Putin, she answered simply: “For me it’s always been important, and I won’t deviate from this, that I try to be as I am, and that I’m well prepared for the substance.”

Mr. Putin, knowing that Ms. Merkel had once been bitten by a dog, brought his pet Labrador into a meeting with her in 2007, and Ms. Merkel visibly tensed. But Mr. Ulrich said that attempts to intimidate her ultimately fail: “She’s afraid of dogs, but not of men.”

Indeed, at the Torgau rally, she faced down a small, mostly male group of protesters from the populist, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party. “It’s a Hillary moment,” Ms. Tempel said. “They hate everything she stands for.” The protesters blew whistles at a deafening pitch throughout her stump speech. Ms. Merkel continued serenely, pausing only to note how lucky they were to live in a society that allows protest. When she was splattered by a tomato at another rally, she calmly wiped it off her jacket.

Such unflappability is one reason so many voters simply do not focus on the fact she is a woman. Asked whether she thought being a woman had influenced how Ms. Merkel governs, Ute Oskrowski, a nurse from Dresden, shot back, “What kind of question is that?”

In the wake of the protests at the rallies, Jana Hensel, a prominent German novelist, wrote Ms. Merkel an open letter, asking her to publicly confront the men who belittled her, as an example to the writer’s own son. And Mr. Ulrich said that Ms. Merkel’s very reluctance to spell out her achievements and governing philosophy could risk diminishing her legacy, since successors could backpedal.

So what lessons does her long tenure hold for women who aspire to lead? Melanne Verveer, who worked for Mrs. Clinton when she was first lady and was an ambassador at large for global women’s issues in her State Department, said she has reluctantly concluded that the subtle path to power is the surer one, for now. That’s the only way for women to come across as effective and yet not appear threatening. “I wish it weren’t,” Ms. Verveer said, “but it is still very much the case.”

Susan Chira (@susanchira) is a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues for The New York Times.